NSBA Editorial/Boards’ Eye View: The Bush years: Some lessons learned
01/09—As the education community looks forward to a new era in the federal role in education, it’s also a good time to look back and evaluate what has happened over the last eight years -- and consider the lessons to be learned.
Primarily, the Bush years will be remembered for the No Child Left Behind Act. Through this legislation, the federal government established a framework to hold schools accountable for ensuring that students -- focusing on those groups that have experienced low rates of achievement -- receive an education that will prepare them to be productive members of society.
NCLB seeks to achieve this goal through state testing and a complex system for measuring progress and imposing sanctions on schools that fail to measure up to their state’s annual goals.
On the positive side, NCLB has pushed many schools to work harder to raise the educational achievement of students whose below-par performance might otherwise have gone unnoticed or not been adequately addressed. It also has provided local educators and policymakers with a wealth of data from which to make more strategic decisions on how best to raise student achievement.
But while NCLB was well-intentioned, it is badly flawed. Among its shortcomings:
• It holds schools accountable for a goal that is unattainable (requiring all students to be proficient).
• It equates success with a limited segment of the school population (the percent needed to reach the “proficiency” cut score).
• It uses a single state test that cannot possibly measure the full range of skills that students should have.
• It imposes a one-size-fits-all set of sanctions that is not strategically matched with the true needs of individual students or schools.
NCLB’s shortcomings are significant in terms of their financial cost, waste of valuable staff time, and the educationally dysfunctional actions schools are forced to take. Part of the problem was that NCLB was created out of whole cloth by lawmakers who couldn’t predict the negative ramifications.
But the larger problem stems from the fact that although the flaws were known six months after its enactment, nearly seven years have now passed and Washington still has not done anything to fix it -- and might not until 2010.
There are several reasons for this inaction. Simply stated, the legislation has been too complicated and politically charged for lawmakers to undertake revisions. Every provision attracts its own set of Beltway advocacy groups with opposing points of view, and many lawmakers are more often driven by political ideology than sound education policy.
This certainly has been true at the regulatory level. At best, the Department of Education only trickled out the most modest accommodations needed to stave off political pressure around specific provisions. Then in the closing days of the Bush administration, it irresponsibly dumped a whole new set of regulations on schools -- including provisions that a new administration would be foolish to go along with.
The big lesson learned from NCLB is that regardless of how logically appealing it might be for some to direct the actual substance of education, the federal government is incapable of making policy decisions that are free from the distractions or paralysis of political consideration. Rather, there is much the federal government can do to steer its role in a supportive direction. [See NSBA’s recommendations on page 11].
Then there is the crucial area of funding. Seven years of experience with serious underfunding for NCLB, along with more than three decades of failure to fully fund the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, shows that the federal government’s funding priorities will not match its promises -- even when mandates and national goals are involved. As we look forward, if there is limited funding, a new administration might be caught between allocating additional funds on new initiatives and seeking increased funds for programs created by its predecessors.
There are several funding lessons learned from the Bush years. First, Congress must let go of the mindset that single-digit increases in “good” years flanked by level funding in bad years will somehow move education forward. A big investment is needed.
Second, especially in light of the fiscal realities now facing the nation’s schools, the federal government should fully fund its current mandates first, repeal specific provisions that aren’t absolutely necessary, and then not create any new mandates, especially if it is not prepared to immediately fully fund them.
Despite these frustrations, this look backward should not dampen our optimism about the future. There is much that the federal government can do to elevate education as a national priority. We will be working with the new administration and Congress to make that happen.
Reproduced with permission from
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